I'm sorry to announce this to you, but the last PowerBook was released 21 years ago

Or get an AMD 395 laptop or mini PC for half the price of an equivalent mac device

$600 for 32GB ram seems bananas

Unfortunately in the current market 32GB of ddr5 seems to run about $400 as 2x16gb DIMMS, and even more for 1x32GB DIMM (higher density chips are more expensive). So $600 really isn't much over market price, especially considering strix halo uses 8000MHz ram instead of the typical 6000 found in consumer dimms.